chapter one: the commodity Marx began his critique of capitalism with something very ordinary and everyday. The commodity. The first words of Das Kapital are: The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity. Marx, Das Kapital Everyone knows that a commodity is something that is bought and sold, or traded for something else thought to be of equal worth. And it is plain that commodities are bought and sold because they are useful for people. So a commodity has two sides to it. It has a use value and an exchange value. An exchange value expresses itself as the price at which the commodity exchanges. This then is our opening definition of a commodity: It is something that is bought and sold because it is useful for people. Expressed like this, there does not seem to be a problem. The use-value side of the commodity and the exchange-value side seem to fit snugly together. A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. Marx, Das Kapital Book2:Layout 1 3/19/12 1:36 PM Page 3 If at first sight the commodity appears a trivial, easily understood thing, Marx will show that within capitalism, things are not as they appear. Marx's analysis reveals how, in fact, use value and exchange value are at war with each other within modern capitalism. Let us first consider the use-value side of things. Think about a random sample of products: a teabag, a hammer and a pair of binoculars. The first thing you notice about them as use values is how different their uses are. Indeed they are quite unique to each product. Try using a teabag to bang in some nails, or a hammer to magnify a distant object and you are unlikely to have much success. The utility of a thing makes it a use value. But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity. Marx, Das Kapital As well as being distinct from each other, the unique uses these products have depends very much on their physical structure. Imagine making a cup of tea with a teabag that did not have any perforations. Or using binoculars that did not have any lenses inside them. So the usefulness of these products relates to their precise physical structure and combination of elements. Again this all points to the unique and specific qualities they have for being useful. Where do the materials for products come from? Obviously they start life as natural materials in some form or another. Tea comes from plants, their bags a blend of wood and vegetable-based fibers. A hammer made from steel comes from iron and carbon combinations. Glass necessary to make lenses also derives from such natural materials as sand and lime. Of course nature does not spontaneously transform itself into these handy products that make our lives better, more comfortable and more developed. This is a transformation - almost magical in some ways - that is produced by HUMAN LABOR. Labor is, in the first place, a process in which both man and nature participate, and in which man of his own 4 Book2:Layout 1 3/19/12 1:36 PM Page 4 accord starts, regulates, and controls the material reactions between himself and nature. He opposes himself to nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate nature's production in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. Marx, Das Kapital So use value has its origins in nature and human labor. And this is true throughout human history - not just the recent history of capitalist production. Human beings have always produced use values from natural raw materials. And this process of production has in turn developed us as creative, intelligent human beings. The labor process of human beings is quite different from the instinctual activity that governs animals. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labor process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realizes a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. Marx, Das Kapital Because human labor is not directed by instinctual drives but by creativity and imagination, human beings can be inventive. They can adapt to their environment and adapt their environment. They can discover things about themselves and the natural world around them. All this opens up the possibility of making a human history distinct from the history of nature. 5 Book2:Layout 1 3/19/12 1:36 PM Page 5 The development of the human hand as a tool-making organ was decisive in the development of a human history. As Marx's lifelong friend and collaborator Frederick Engels wrote: The first operations for which our ancestors gradually learned to adapt their hands during the many thousands of years of transition from ape to man could have been only very simple ones. The lowest savages ... are nevertheless far superior to these transitional beings. Before the first flint could be fashioned into a knife by human hands, a period of time probably elapsed in comparison with which the historical period known to us appears insignificant. But the decisive step had been taken; the hand had become free and could henceforth attain ever greater dexterity; the greater flexibility thus acquired was inherited and increased from generation to generation. Frederick Engels, The Part Played By Labor In The Transition From Ape To Man 6 Frederick Engels Book2:Layout 1 3/19/12 1:36 PM Page 6 So labor is the very basis of what and who we are as human beings. The unique use values that labor produces derive in turn from the specific qualities which particular kinds of labor bring to the raw materials they work on. If you want to make paper then it simply will not do to treat wood as if it were iron ore and put it in a hot furnace. Labor must work with the particular qualities which different natural materials have. It will be important to remember the hymn to human creativity embodied in labor that Marx writes about here when we get to consider what happens to human labor under capitalism. Now, human labor produces two types of products. One type functions as tools or raw materials that will be used in further acts of labor. The other type produces final products that can be consumed or used by individuals to reproduce themselves - whether that is a roof over their heads or a bite to eat. Tools and raw materials that have already been worked upon by human labor remain only latent or potential use values. They require further labor to make those use values a reality. Living labor must seize upon these things and rouse them from their death-sleep, change them from mere possible use values into real and effective ones. Bathed in the fire of labor, appropriated as part and parcel of labor's organism, and, as it were, made alive for the performance of their functions in the process, they are in truth consumed, but consumed with a purpose, as elementary constituents of new use values, of new products, ever ready as means of subsistence for individual consumption, or as means of production for some new labor process. Marx, Das Kapital Marx's argument that living labor is required to realize the potential inherent in tools (including advanced machinery) or raw materials will be very important later on for his analysis of capitalism. Finally we should note that although labor is absolutely central to what Marx called our "species being," labor is in turn dependent on nature. This relationship, Marx says in Das Kapital, is the, "everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence, and there7 Book2:Layout 1 3/19/12 1:36 PM Page 7 fore is independent of every social phase of that existence, or rather, is common to every such phase." Just as it is worth thinking about what happens to human labor when capitalism comes on the historical scene, so too it is worth thinking about what happens to nature and our relationship to nature under capitalism. For now, though, the one thing you need to take from what we have said so far is that use values and the process of producing them are characterized by unique and specific qualities. We have been considering the use-value side of products. As we have seen, human beings have always produced use values in order to survive and in order to develop. That production is likely to have been under difficult and unjust circumstances (for example, serfdom or slavery) but that is not the issue right now. Use values ... constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth. Marx, Das Kapital However, in the last few hundred years, the production of use values has been embodied largely in commodities. This is a new social form of wealth that we call capitalism, and it means that use values are now combined with exchange values. In the form of society we are about to consider, [use values] are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange value. Marx, Das Kapital So what is exchange value? It must be the value at which commodities exchange for each other. This exchange value finds its expression in prices. And what are prices? Prices are wooing glances cast at money by commodities. Marx, Das Kapital In money, commodities find an easily divisible and portable means of exchange. But money also measures the value of commodities. So the exchange value of a commodity finds a mirror of its value in money. Where once in precapitalist times an ordinary commodity such 8 Book2:Layout 1 3/19/12 1:36 PM Page 8 as a chicken might have been traded for another ordinary commodity such as salt, today, under capitalism, one ordinary commodity is exchanged for money. Commodities find their own value already represented without any initiative on their part, in another commodity existing in company with them. Marx, Das Kapital Money is the universal mirror or equivalent that keeps company with all other ordinary commodities. It is in fact no more than a commodity itself, because it is a representation of the exchange value of the ordinary commodity. Money functions as a means of circulation only because in it the values of commodities have independent reality. Marx, Das Kapital We can find out something important about the nature of exchange value by taking a closer look at money - which is both the means of exchange and the measure of value. Imagine three piles of money, each bigger than the other. The first thing that we notice about these piles of money is that there is very little difference between them. The only difference in fact is a quantitative one. Now this is in contrast to our three ordinary commodities we discussed earlier: the teabag, the hammer and the binoculars. We saw that each of those had very different qualities. Of course these qualities come in certain quantities. The quantitative dimension is a natural part of what they are, but it is the qualitative dimension that is most crucial to their differential usefulness. But money is pretty much just money. There is not a lot you can do with it. 9 Book2:Layout 1 3/19/12 1:36 PM Page 9 10 You cannot wear money, eat it, smoke it or use it to put nails into woodwork. It has a very thin qualitative dimension. The most important thing about money for most people is its quantitative dimension: how much you have! You can of course spend money, which is what we generally do with it. But money itself does not really have much of an intrinsic use value in the way a teabag does or a painting by Picasso. As Georg Simmel, a Marx-influenced German sociologist wrote at the turn of the twentieth century: Money, with all its colorlessness and indifference, becomes the common denominator of all values; irreparably it hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific value, and their incomparability. Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life So in this sense money is not the same as an ordinary commodity. It is pure exchange value; it is the expression of the commodity only in terms of its monetary worth. To put it another way, it is the expression of only the exchange-value side of the commodity. As use values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use value. Marx, Das Kapital What would it mean to look at our ordinary commodities as if they did not contain an "atom of use value"? Well, we would then only be measuring their value and the different amounts of each commodity that would make them equivalent. So around 100 teabags would be equivalent to one hammer and around 1,000 teabags might be equivalent to a particular pair of binoculars, while maybe 7 hammers would equate to the same pair of binoculars. Georg Simmel Book2:Layout 1 3/19/12 1:36 PM Page 10 By making these commodities equivalent, we are no longer concerned with what differentiates them - i.e., their use values. In terms of their qualities they are all the same - simply expressions of value that are quantitatively comparable. Instead of taking 1,000 teabags to a shop selling binoculars, we take money, but whether we take money or teabags, we would basically be implying the same thing: that $20 is equal to 1,000 teabags or one pair of binoculars. The exchange of commodities is evidently an act characterized by a total abstraction from use value. Marx, Das Kapital In making 1,000 teabags equivalent to 7 hammers and one pair of binoculars we are discarding their differences and saying that they all share something in common (the act of abstraction Marx writes about). What they share is the same monetary worth. But what ultimately is value? What is being measured by money and what is being expressed in exchange value? 11 Book2:Layout 1 3/19/12 1:36 PM Page 11 12 Marx's answer must initially strike us as strange. It is the human labor power embodied in the commodities which gives them their value. This is strange because we have already seen that human labor is a producer of use values and it shares with use values their unique and specific qualities. So how can human labor power also be crystallized into a commodity as exchange value, as something that is "a mere congelation of homogenous human labor," as Marx calls it? Something must happen to human labor when it starts producing commodities under capitalism to enable wildly different commodities to be measured as equivalents. Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labor embodied in them and the concrete forms of that labor. There is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labor, human labor in the abstract. Marx, Das Kapital So while human labor produces use values on the one hand, on the other, human labor undergoes some sort of "abstraction" and it is this abstract human labor that produces value in commodities. We have now learned that commodities are made up of two parts: use value and exchange value. We have begun to see that their combination in a commodity might not be as harmonious as we first supposed. Why? Because exchange value is entirely indifferent to use Book2:Layout 1 3/19/12 1:36 PM Page 12 13 value. Use value and exchange value then are strange bedfellows. They are joined together in the commodity but one is characterized by the principle of quality (use value) and the other by the principle of quantity (exchange value). Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange values. Marx, Das Kapital We can begin to see that the two sides of the commodity might not necessarily get along. We have the basis here of a contradiction. A contradiction arises when two principles that negate one another are embodied within a phenomenon, an object or a system. Further, we have seen that the twofold character of the commodity is related somehow to the twofold character of labor when it starts producing commodities. On the one hand there is concrete labor, what Marx in Das Kapital calls "a special sort of productive activity, the nature of which is determined by its aim, mode of operation, subject, means, and result." On the other hand there is abstract labor - which is not a separate activity but is woven into concrete labor. But abstract labor seems to be the polar opposite of concrete labor. It has no specificity or particularity about it. Abstract labor is homogeneous and equivalent, without differentiation, merely an expenditure of physiological energy. (We don't know yet why labor becomes abstract - although there are clues in what has been said so far - or how this abstract labor relates to concrete labor, but we will find this all out later.) This has been the basis of how commodities exchange in modern societies. The upside of being able to equate wildly different things has been an enormous expansion of use values available to huge numbers of people (money permitting). Marx was the first to applaud the successes of capitalism. Book2:Layout 1 3/19/12 1:36 PM Page 13 But we can already see that the internal contradictions between use value and exchange value, and between concrete labor and abstract labor, are a problem. Marx was convinced that these contradictions, as they developed and deepened, eroded the historic justification for capitalism's continued existence. At this point you might be wondering if you have picked up the wrong book. Perhaps you expected something about exploited workers and greedy capitalists? Well, we will get to them soon, but in order to understand what is at stake in that struggle, what social forces these types really represent, we need to proceed broadly, as Marx did. The method of analysis which I have employed, and which had not previously been applied to economic subjects, makes the reading of the first chapters rather arduous. ... There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits. Marx, Preface to the French edition of Das Kapital The method of analysis Marx employed is called immanent critique. It starts with a simple category (e.g., the commodity) and gradually "unfolds" into more elaborate and complex webs of categories. It is motivated to do so because this "internal" criticism finds contradictions within and between the categories and discovers aspects of reality that the categories cannot explain. This then motivates the critic to develop new categories or refine old ones so they have greater explanatory power. This is an unusual approach, probably unfamiliar to many readers used to arguments being built around historical narratives and empirical information. Marx's approach was influenced by the German philosophical tradition, especially the great philosopher Hegel. It is a powerful way into the subject because his critique does not depend on Marx arbitrarily applying his own economic, political and moral yardsticks to capitalism. Instead, by the time Marx has finished, he has exploded his subject - capitalism - from within. 14 Hegel Book2:Layout 1 3/19/12 1:36 PM Page 14 15 Now we must enter a magical domain - the land of the market in advanced capitalism. This is the domain where bourgeois economics and politics are at their happiest because the way things appear here in the domain of exchange presents capitalism in the best possible light. This is the domain that provides the fertile soil in which many of the ideals and values of capitalist society grow. It is plain that commodities cannot go to market and make exchanges of their own account. We must, therefore, have recourse to their guardians, who are also their owners. Commodities are things, and therefore without power of resistance against man. ... In order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another, as persons whose chapter two: the exchange of commodities Book2:Layout 1 5/4/12 10:23 AM Page 15 will resides in those objects, and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other, and part with his own, except by means of an act done by mutual consent. They must therefore, mutually recognize in each other the rights of private proprietors. This juridical relation, which thus expresses itself in a contract, whether such contract be part of a developed legal system or not, is a relation between two wills, and is but the reflex of the real economic relation between the two. Marx, Das Kapital Marx is being a little ironic here, because we will later find out that commodities do in fact have "power of resistance" against their supposed owners. But our identity as consumers is fostered continually by capitalism within the sphere of exchange. Our sense that being a consumer empowers us is rooted in the daily reality of entering the market. This is a realm apparently of freedom, a realm where commodity owners meet and exchange on the basis of consent. It is a realm of law and a place where we express our individual will. In other words, exchange is not just about economics, it is about how we behave, how we feel, what assumptions we make and what society as a whole validates as "normal." To look more closely at what goes on in the sphere of exchange we must have some dramatis personae: a Buyer and Seller. Our Buyer sallies forth into the market in search of a coat. Winter is approaching and our Buyer wants to be prepared. Our Buyer has in her pocket a commodity which she can exchange 16 Book2:Layout 1 3/19/12 1:36 PM Page 16 for the coat she desires. That commodity is money, which Marx tells us is merely a commodity itself - the commodity in money form. It is not money that renders commodities commensurable. Just the contrary. It is because all commodities, as values, are realized human labor, and therefore commensurable, that their values can be measured by one and the same special commodity, and the latter be converted into the common measure of their values - i.e., into money. Marx, Das Kapital So our Buyer has the common measure of values in her pocket. Our Buyer knows, because she has experienced the way the market works since she was a little child, that without this special commodity in her pocket, she will not have any "will" or agency in the marketplace. Only the absolutely penniless experience the market as an utter rejection. With a few coins, we can all enter the market clothed with a sense of purpose, no matter how threadbare. That purpose is felt to be our own. And at one level, it really is. It is our Buyer who has decided that among all the things she needs, today she needs to buy a coat. No one commanded our Buyer to enter the market. And in the market, no Seller can command our Buyer to part with their money. Nevertheless, our Buyer must enter into the market to meet her needs. The one thing that our Buyer cannot buy is an opt out from the market. Within the market our Buyer passes other Buyers. Some of them are more wealthy than our Buyer. Some are less wealthy. But all are buying with the same material, the same money. There is not one means of exchange for some people and another means of exchange for others. Sometimes, people of very different economic means will even buy the same goods in the same shops. But from the exchange itself, you see only an identical act of buying. In his work Grundrisse, a series of notes that formed the preparations for what would become Das Kapital, Marx writes: A worker who buys a loaf of bread and a millionaire who does the same appear in this act only as simple buyers, just as, in respect to them, the grocer appears only as a seller. Marx, Grundrisse 17 Book2:Layout 1 3/19/12 1:36 PM Page 17 18 Our Buyer is not overtly aware of such social differences, but still hurries past shops she knows she doesn't want to spend money in because she can afford to spend more on a coat than the coats these shops generally sell. Our Buyer also loiters outside the windows of other shops that sell clothes at prices more than she wishes to spend. It is not that such coats are absolutely out of our Buyer's ability to buy. But our Buyer has many needs, both today and tomorrow, and each need costs money in the market. So our Buyer must weigh and assess each purchase in relation to how much of that special commodity she has available to her that measures the values of other commodities. Eventually our Buyer finds the coat she desires and exchanges $100 for it. At that magical moment, value undergoes a change of form. The money that was in the pocket of our Buyer is transformed into the coat which has a use value that our Buyer wants. The coat that was in the shop is transformed into the money that left our Buyer's pocket. The conversion of a commodity into money is the simultaneous conversion of money into a commodity. Marx, Das Kapital The shop assistant wishes our Buyer "a nice day" but both Buyer and Seller know that their relationship is entirely limited to the act of exchange. The persons exist for one another merely as representatives of, and therefore as owners of, commodities. Marx, Das Kapital Our Buyer leaves the shop and passes a homeless person begging for money. A bit exhausted by the process of shopping but satisfied by the result, our Buyer purchases a newspaper and enters a caf for a quick respite. While there she reads in the newspaper that a new report shows that inequality has grown in the last ten years. In the financial pages, however, she reads that profits are up for a number of big retail companies. Now, if we look at what has just happened we can see how our Buyer would feel that her "will" has been expressed in the exchange of commodities. We can see too that even when our Buyer is aware Book2:Layout 1 3/19/12 1:36 PM Page 18 19 of some limits on her agency (as when she was looking into the windows of the expensive shops) it is nevertheless her own rational calculation of her situation that is responsible for the decision to spend only this much on a coat. If she had decided to spend more than she strictly had, perhaps by using a credit card, no seller would have told her that perhaps she should think again. The Buyer appears to be, for better or worse, the master of her world. Out of the act of exchange itself, the individual ... is reflected in himself as its exclusive and dominant (determinant) subject. With that, then, the complete freedom of the individual is posited: voluntary transaction; no force on either side; positing the self ... as dominant and primary. Marx, Grundrisse After all, our Buyer has just exchanged $100 for a coat which will be very useful in the winter. Now, does our Buyer feel she got "value for money"? This is an interesting expression. What does it imply? It suggests that when we exchange a given amount of money for a commodity we desire, we are getting back an equivalent amount of value embodied in the commodity. Book2:Layout 1 3/19/12 1:36 PM Page 19 20 Price is the money-name of the labor realized in a commodity. Hence the expression of the equivalence of a commodity with the sum of money constituting its price is a tautology. Marx, Das Kapital Now, this is a bit strange. Our Buyer appears to have exchanged an equivalent for an equivalent. Exactly, as Marx notes, a tautology. She has handed over $100 for a coat that embodies $100 of human labor in it. But if this is how the market works, why did our Buyer pass shops she did not wish to shop in, pass shops she wished to shop in but could not afford to, encounter a beggar in the street, and read news of growing inequality alongside news of rising profits for big retail companies? The exchange of equivalents does not appear to be able to address these aspects of reality. Marx is quite adamant, though, that this is indeed what often happens. The whole process effectuates ... nothing more than an exchange of products. If commodities, or commodities and money, of equal exchange value, and consequently equivalents, are exchanged, it is plain that no one abstracts more value from circulation than he throws into it. Marx, Das Kapital Perhaps, though, we could explain some of the things in our little scenario by the fact that very often equivalents are not exchanged? After all, there are a number of situations where this might happen. For example, where demand is much higher than supply, then prices rise above the value embodied in commodities. Or where a market is dominated by a few large companies, the Book2:Layout 1 3/19/12 1:36 PM Page 20 21 absence of competition can again push prices up above the value embodied in them. Or again some people can be persuaded to pay more money for a product than they are strictly "worth" because a brand label is attached to the commodity. All these things are true, but they would not explain any of the differences in wealth that we observed in our scenario. We cannot really believe that our beggar is a beggar because he or she made a series of extremely poor purchasing decisions marked by overpayment. Nor can we believe that that is why social inequality in general is growing, according to the newspaper report. We cannot believe that the millionaire in the grocery shop is a millionaire simply because he or she only makes purchases in very competitive markets where "good value for money" is always obtained. A society run along these lines would make brand-led purchases (with their inflated prices) inexplicable and indeed impossible. Moreover, we know that supply often exceeds demand. We know that there are times when companies engage in cut-price competition. And we know there are markets in goods which do not depend on brands to inflate prices. So what we have seen so far in the act of exchange cannot explain the signs of inequality and social stratification hiding beneath the surface of the market. Crucially it does not explain how value is generated. Nor does it explain how it is possible for some people to consistently appropriate more value - a surplus - than they commit to the market. Suppose our Buyer paid $110 for a coat worth $100. In such a situation, the Seller has enticed $10 more out of the Buyer's pocket than before. This simply means that the Buyer has $10 less to spend on something else - which is both her loss and a loss to another Seller. As Marx says, on selling dear: The value in circulation has not increased by one iota, it is only distributed differently. ... The sum of values in circulation can clearly not be augmented by any change in their distribution. Marx, Das Kapital Book2:Layout 1 3/19/12 1:36 PM Page 21 Of course, our Buyer cannot be just a buyer. In a market society Buyers and Sellers are positions which all people occupy at different times. Perhaps our Buyer is also a Seller who has managed to exchange a commodity worth $90 for $100. In that case as a Seller, our Buyer has enticed $10 more out of the pocket of another Buyer than she herself put onto the market. Again this simply means that this second Buyer has $10 less to spend elsewhere. If our second Buyer continued to do so then this person would eventually end up as a beggar in the street. But this behavior is inexplicable. We have seen that as Buyers and Sellers we are encouraged to be rational and calculative. We might make the odd mistake, but to systematically hand over more value than we get back is contrary both to our interests and contrary to the way the market explains market behavior. Turn and twist then as we may, the fact remains unaltered. If equivalents are exchanged, no surplus value results, and if non-equivalents are exchanged, still no surplus value. Circulation, or the exchange of commodities, begets no value. Marx, Das Kapital So we have a conundrum. Market mechanisms cannot explain the origins - the production - of the very substance, value, which market mechanisms exist to exchange. This limitation to the explanatory power of market categories also affects all politics, economics and cultural spheres that base themselves on expressing only market categories and categories that do not question what Marx called the appearance or "phenomenal" form of capitalist or bourgeois society. In present bourgeois society as a whole, this positing of prices and their circulation, etc., appears as the surface process, beneath which, however in the depths, entirely different processes go on, in which this apparent individual equality and liberty disappear. Marx, Grundrisse From what we have seen already, it is clear that Marx's Das Kapital is not just a work about economics. Nor do its implications affect only economics. The whole domain of human culture and con22 Book2:Layout 1 3/19/12 1:36 PM Page 22 sciousness under capitalism is powerfully impacted by what we can broadly call "market ways of thinking." The limited explanatory power of market categories, matched with the extensive presence of the market in every aspect of our lives, is likely to encourage ways of thinking that are profoundly inadequate to reality. In "the depths" of reality, something very different is going on from the surface. For example, and to return to the economic side of things, market categories of supply and demand, buyers and sellers, prices and money, and so forth, cannot explain economic crises. Nothing can be more childish than the dogma, that because every sale is a purchase, and every purchase a sale, therefore the circulation of commodities necessarily implies an equilibrium of sales and purchases. Marx, Das Kapital We are not yet in a position to know why sale and purchase may not necessarily go hand in hand in harmony, but Marx notes that the very categories imply both a connection and a separation. If the interval in time between the two complimentary phases of the complete metamorphosis of a commodity becomes too great, if the split between the sale and the purchase become too pronounced, the intimate connection between them, their oneness, asserts itself by producing a crisis. Marx, Das Kapital We have seen that this market economy also implies a certain way of relating to other people that is a certain kind of society. At this stage we can note a very curious paradox about the relationship between people in such a society: The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the preestablished harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in the interest of all. Marx, Das Kapital 23 Book2 :Layout 1 3/19/12 1:36 PM Page 23 Just as market categories assume a tendency towards equilibrium, so a market society assumes that social unity and harmony can be built on the back of the pursuit of self-interest! No wonder Marx has some satiric fun with that idea. But let us return to the essential economic contradiction: Market categories cannot explain the origin of the very substance they are designed to exchange. Value. To solve this mystery we have to take our leave from the "noisy sphere" of exchange where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men. Instead we will have to descend into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face "No admittance except on business." Here we shall see, not only how capital produces but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making. Marx, Das Kapital